Bill Slawski : Rewriting the Wikipedia on Search Engine Optimization

If you’re going to try and clean up the face and perception of SEO, might as well get started with rewriting the definition. I was tickled today when stopping by my good friend and former workmate Bill Slawski’s SEO by the SEA blog and reading Bill’s latest post Improving the Wikipedia results for Search Engine Optimization.

Bill, who is infamous in SEO, usability, and Newark Delaware’s coffee shop & newsstand circles as being an unselfish contributor of his wealth of opinions and information; is not too happy with the Wikipedia’s pages on Search Engine Optimization and feels that it is his obligation to add the knowledge of his years & experience from Cre8asite, SEO by the SEA and more recently Search Engine Watch to his new mission.

From Bill’s post:

Statements like this one really need to be changed:

Search engine operators became interested in the SEO community soon after the first search engine was launched. In some early search engines, such as Infoseek, ranking #1 was as easy as grabbing the source code of the top ranked page, placing it on your site, and submitting a URL to instantly index and rank that page.

As far as I know, there wasn’t an SEO community that sprung up out of nowhere at the time that the first search engines were launched.

I’d like to see the Wikipedia article improve, and I ask that if you have some ideas and a few spare moments in the next couple of weeks, to visit the page and see if you can help make it better. I’ll be making more changes as I find time. Instead of trying to add links to external resources, a sentence or two in the article itself that helps improve its quality would be a great addition.

I highly recommend stopping by SEO by the SEA, reading Bill’s post in its entirety (refill your coffee cup before hand), and maybe even lending a hand to Bill’s new project.